


Slice of Life #3

by kinfic2



Category: Queer as Folk (US)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2015-12-30
Packaged: 2018-05-10 10:30:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5582249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kinfic2/pseuds/kinfic2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The melody is the same for both, but the lyrics are different for each.<br/>Takes place after episode 301</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slice of Life #3

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on my LJ in 2009

BRIAN:

  
_“Why would she treat us so thoughtlessly?_ _How could she do this to me?_  
                                                      We gave her everything money could buy. _But something inside was always denied.”  ©Lennon/McCartney_  
  
So this was what it was like. He’d forgotten. He’d forgotten how it felt to hurt. He didn’t remember it being this bone chilling, this penetrating. But then, it was so very long ago that he allowed himself to feel anything, particularly pain.  
  
Chugging from the tightly clutched bottle, he grimaced as the liquid heat slid down his throat. But he welcomed the burn like an old and trusted friend. Regardless what he did or didn’t do, said or didn’t say, Beam never abandoned him. Even now, faced with insurmountable odds, its familiar therapeutic properties worked overtime to thaw the iceberg of his heart before it broke in two. Little did they know it was already too late.    
  
He swiped a hand across his mouth and concentrated on merging his double vision into one cohesive view for a successful maneuver across the room. But despite the effort, a brief lapse of focus interrupted his erratic journey. He scrambled to keep his balance with an improvised two-step and a hasty grab at the partition for support. Even though he didn’t need help. From anything or anyone.  
  
One last gulp and he relinquished his hold on the empty bottle without a fight. He blurrily followed its rolling path on the floor toward fallen comrades, those who had already surrendered their contents for the cause, “The Survival of Brian Kinney.” With a drunken giggle, he wondered if his makeshift graveyard was a fitting and proper end for them.  
  
Pissed off by the delay of mind-numbing oblivion, he launched a verbal assault of obscenities against the soliders in his bedroom. As his inebriated mind tended to do during these occasions, thoughts became quick-change artists. They hurtled from bizarrely irrational to serenely logical, from crushing despair to overwhelming rage. His very own “Theatre of the Absurd.”    
  
The longer he stared at the bed, the more his eyes narrowed, until all that was left were hazel slits glinting with a sheen of—only anger, he told himself. In the middle of his desolation, a strangled wail pierced the tomblike stillness. There was no one else in the loft. Where did the horrific sound come from, and why did _he_ feel such gut-wrenching pain? Why couldn’t _he_ breathe?  
  
With frantic gasps squeezing his chest against the hard shell of his ribs, he sank to his knees and crawled onto the bed. Curled in a fetal position, he wrapped his arms around a pillow that wasn't his and recited the mantra that provided fleeting moments of sanity to his fractured psyche. The words mere whispers on his lips, he hummed off-key into now damp Egyptian cotton before a tortured sleep claimed him:   
  
_“The other night dear as I lay sleeping,_ _I dreamed I held you in my arms._  
                                              _When I awoke dear I was mistaken_ _ _,_ and I hung my head and cried._  
_You are my sunshine, my only sunshine_ _. You made me happy when skies were gray_.  
                                              _You’ll never know dear how much I loved you._ _Please don’t take your sunshine away.”_ _©G.Autrey_  
  
JUSTIN:  
  
                                  **I'm not here to give pleasure, but to fill the abyss of want, to recall what that want is.** B.M.Koltas  
  
He fondled the delicate petals of the long-stemmed rose next to his pillow and breathed in its scented promise of tomorrow. So this was what it was like—affection, attention, consideration—emotions so foreign to him the past two years, he’d forgotten how they felt.  
  
He stretched lazily, his body arching in contentment with splayed fingers and pointed toes. Unable to repress the self-satisfied grin, he trailed a hand through his disheveled hair, and a sated sigh fell from his lips. Like an almost completed jigsaw puzzle,the various pieces of _him_ were coalescing without the the stress of emotional extremes.  
  
He often wondered if he’d ever be lucky enough to be a “significant other,” to be appreciated, to feel as if he mattered. Perhaps with someone, he hoped. Never with Brian, he knew.  
  
The simple truth was that no matter how ferociously Brian’s flame ignited his soul, it also scorched his heart. How could he have thought there was a chance for them? Was it because he wanted so desperately to believe what his heart was telling him to feel and needed so badly to ignore what his brain was telling him to understand?  
  
It wasn’t a mind-blowing epiphany or a surge of sudden intellectual perception that gave him clarity. It was the heartbreaking realization that Brian didn’t seem to care. In typical Kinney style, there were no threats or ultimatums, no hateful confrontations. There was just a quietly controlled declaration. _It’s your call. You decide where you want to be._ If he stayed, he would have to accept the status quo. If he left? Apparently that was all right, too. Here today, gone tomorrow. Looking back on that moment, he tries not to hate him.   
  
A deeper sigh escaped. Denied passage on the moonboat to dreamland by memories that teased and taunted, he turned on his side and buried one hand under his pillow while the other played with the prickly thorns on the rose's stem. As he floated in the netherland between illusion and fact, his eyes fluttered shut, but they flew open when his finger telegraphed an SOS to his brain. He bolted upright and as he lapped at the pooling red bubble, he recalled a childhood fairytale. Would he too, fall into an everlasting sleep and need Prince Charming’s kiss to awaken?  
  
His vision blurred by a misty film—only because his finger hurt, he told himself—he hummed a familiar melody, "Someday my prince will come, someday when my dreams come true." And he swore he did not hear the words, _always only Brian._

                           **When you get what you want, you end up wanting what you left behind.**  
                                    
                                         
                                                                                 


End file.
